Kartell Goes Bourgie: 14 Designers Reimagine the Bourgie

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 10 years since Kartell launched its iconic Bourgie lamp by Ferruccio Laviani. To celebrate the anniversary, Kartell invited 14 designers to re-imagine the lamp in their own way. The results are a series of sculptural lamps each with their own, unique designer twist that will start as a exhibition at January’s Maison&Objet and then travel on to other events. Check out the diverse mix of reinterpretations:

(Basically, he said go to anyplace that cheap bracelets are sold and buy all kinds – anything that is funny, colorful, or shiny to embellish the lamp.)

Christophe Pillet

From Transparent Crystal to Coal Black.

Patrick Jouin

The future is a present from the past.

Eugeni Quitllet

Bourgie is a gift in the form of an imaginary cake… after surprising and exciting the world for 10 years, it is time to light the 10 candles for its birthday and make a wish! Happy Bourgie to you!

Eugeni Quitllet

Alberto Meda

“Return to the future” to go beyond the liking for quotation and rediscover a unitary vision, of the whole, beyond the fragments and details.

Nendo

“Eigruob” For our contribution, we decided to work with two of the lamp’s most distinctive characteristics – its use of silhouettes and its transparency – rather than touching the original design itself. We created a new table lamp by inverting and rotating the Bourgie lamp’s silhouette, so that when two of the new lamps are lined up together, the space between them forms the upside-down silhouette of the Bourgie lamp. Because our homage inverts both the lamp’s figure-ground relationship and our regular sense of up and down, we named the lamp ‘Eigruob’.

Nendo

Front

Liquid
By heating up the Bourgie Lamp, Front could re-shape it and give the lamp a unique shape. The lamp looks like it is moving or leaning over your shoulder to give you light when you read. Front has given an individual shape to the lamp that inspires you to imagine the character of the lamp.

Ludovica+Roberto Palomba

Our Bourgie is a tribute to Ferruccio, to the pen sketch that generated the shape of the object. That iron wire that we imagined thus became our design, the watershed between the idea and the design brought into being.

Piero Lissoni

My inspiration came from a documentary on Fellini who asked his set designer to build him a big city made of paper. And that is how I saw the Bourgie: big and made of paper.

Tokujin Yoshioka

The light sparks as if a star shines.

Rodolfo Dordoni

I have known Ferruccio for a lifetime and look on him as a brother, and that’s what I call him… my brother “Ferro” (the abbreviation of his name is also the Italian word for iron). When I thought about an interpretation of his lamp, the association was immediate: Wrought iron/Ferro! The name of my interpretation of Bourgie is therefore “Ferro forgé” – that is wrought iron – voilà.

Mario Bellini

Nothing is created … everything is transformed.

Patricia Urquiola

1) Portrait of a lady
The iconic emblem of the Bourgie lamp lives on in our memory like a portrait of ancient times.

2) Carousel
The profile of the Bourgie lamp becomes a lighting element in itself, recalling the image of an old merry-go-round.